An activist organization has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Observers noted the apparent data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
